Not so new, and not that funny either

Entertainment writer

Interestingly, New Girl (Eleven, 8.30pm) is still called ''New Girl'', even though it's now in its third season and the guys that live with ''new girl'' Jess are really pretty used to her by now. In fact, Nick is so used to her that he's sleeping with her.

This is the problem when you come up with a show's title without thinking it through: if New Girl had just been called ''Girl'', it would've had a timeless quality and also summed up in superior fashion the central premise of the show, to wit: there is a girl.

The show in its current incarnation could be called ''New Guy'', as the most recent arrival to the apartment is Coach, played by Damon Wayans jnr, one of the lesser twigs of the Wayans family tree. Except that Coach is actually an old guy - he was in the pilot, then went away, and recently came back, presumably because the writers felt there wasn't enough dullness in the cast.

Coach is not a compelling character - he's really a disgrace to the noble tradition of TV characters called Coach, like Coach from Cheers, or Coach from Coach.

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Tuesday's episode is very Coach-heavy, which means a lot of dullness. Jess wants to be friends with Coach, so she pretends to be interested in basketball, but this causes a problem with Nick, because he's a Bulls fan, and Jess is faking Pistons fandom to make Coach like her. This leads to Jess and Nick alternately denying the other sex, because this is a sitcom and this is how sitcom people behave.

Jess is one of those ladies with a pathological need to be friends with everyone, without even questioning why she would want to be friends with someone whose company is as unpleasant as Coach's.

And Nick is one of those men who won't have sex with a beautiful woman unless she supports the right basketball team.

So neither of these people have ever actually existed in real life, but then, who wants real life in sitcoms? If we wanted real life, we'd watch the queue at Woolworths.

And New Girl is funnier than the queue at Woolworths. Not by that much, though. But it does have Zooey Deschanel, who is strangely watchable even when her lines aren't all that funny.

Meanwhile, on Blue Bloods (SC10, 10.30pm), things are definitely getting real. Danny and Baez investigate a case involving a woman whose body was dumped after plastic surgery, and Frank asks Jamie to take on a cold case, while Erin gives speed dating a go, which frankly seems like a pretty frivolous decision while all this murder and stuff is going on.

There may be some tense moments across the Blue Bloods family table. But whether or not speed dating can co-exist with the policing lifestyle, one thing is sure: Tom Selleck will look very solemn.